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Much has been made about Siri and the virtual assistants voice recognition capabilities. But, a question hanging over the programs head has been how does it affect battery life and data consumption?

The assumption had been that Siri was a data hog. The assistant relies on Apple’s servers for even the simplest of demands. This constant exchange of data during use could have an incredible impact on users’ data usage, especially those with capped data plans. Jacqui Cheng of ArsTechnica did some testing and the findings may come as a relief to some. The average Siri request uses 63KB of data.

This incredibly small amount of data was found by doing 11 different tasks with six of them being “local” and five that required online access. Local tasks averaged 36.7 KB per query, and online requests utilizing Wolfram Alpha or Web search averaged 94.72KB. Four text dictations were also ran using short e-mails and two text messages and they averaged 72.5KB per query. This proves longer messages require more processing by Apple’s servers and more bandwidth.

Al in all Siri uses between 18.5MB and 27.7MB of data a month based on 10-15 Siri queries a day. Even with the lowest data plan possible of 250MB for iPhone users Siri utilizes at the most 10% of the user’s data. Hopefully these findings ease the minds of those worried Siri would devour their data.

Not really that surprised. If the audio query would be encoded in 8-bit mono wave, it would weight around 8KB per second. Since most queries are not more than 2-3 seconds long, that would make sense. They may also encode them in ALAC but I'm not sure if the encoding overhead would make sense in that situation.

In the end it might not be much but it could also cause people to go over their allowed plan if they are already close to bust. Nevertheless, it's good to know what we are playing with.

I hope Siri isn't a phase. I keep reminding myself its only in Beta. Imagine using Siri across all your iOS devices, television, and computers...it could be a wonderfully simple world.

That's exactly where I'd find it uselful, in the living room. Controlling my TV and media easily. On my phone, I don't think it will be that much useful once the excitement pass. I look at the promo video and I don't really see myself doing much of those things. Still pretty cool regardless!

I dont think siri uses audio files. I think it uses the same voice that you can turn on for accessibility and i think it just sends a text so the phone can read that back to you. Sounds like the same voice.

I use siri for a number of things from turning on my alarm at night texting while driving ( very handy for this as after hitting button once u can talk hands free for rest of conversation!!) I work in a restaurant and constantly giving directions!! I doesn't use any batterie hardly at all and very little data I love her!!!

I agree, I find Siri very useful in my work. It makes logging appointments and setting reminders wonderfully easy. Especially when I set up an event and need my subordinates there as well it sends them the invite right to their calendar or email.

The reason people think its a phase is because so many people just use Siri to ask dumb questions like "what are you wearing" to make their friends laugh, and yes I've done that too lol.

Overall I personally can't wait for it to be used on computers tablets and televisions. Think it will become even greater with research and development just like the original iPod to today's iPod touch.

I don't use Siri terribly often, but I do use the voice to text (same service essentially) when sending longer text messages, emails,etc. I think it's fantastic (this is the number one feature I miss from Android and now I no longer have to miss it!). I had used similar services on Android and those did not seem to use much data so I was never really worried about this either.

The thing that will really show off the 4S I think would be games tailor made for the 4S which utilize the extra cpu and gpu performance. This can go either way though. Game companies can either jump on this, or wait until the following iPhone revision as there are still a whole lot of people using iPhone 4, thus it would be more profitable to make games for that architecture and beyond.